Great powers overextend their security apparatus attempting to maintain an international system from which they benefit. Costly expenditures of internally mobilized hard power in irregular wars increases the the decline of relative power while externally mobilized power in the form of partisans may delay or defeat power transition. This paper examines the U. S. war in Vietnam and the Soviet war in Afghanistan in order to determine if long periods of irregular war had an effect on those state’s relative position in the internaitonal system. This paper will demonstrate that those wars eroded each position without the large, structural war predicted by normative IR theory.

Hans Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations (Knopf, New York, 1972) and Ken Waltz’s Man, the State, and War (Columbia University Press, New York, 2001, and Waltz’s Theory of International Politics (Waveland Press, Long Grove IL, 2010). There is much literature about the definition of a great power. My primary source has been Jack Levy’s War in the Modern Great Power System, 1495–1975 (University Press of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, 1983) also, Mearsheimer’s Tragedy of Great Power Politics and Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and the Fall of Great Powers (Vintage Books Edition, New York, 1989).

Merom, G. (2003) How Democracies Lose Small Wars: State, Society and the Failures of France in Algeria, Israel in Lebanon, and the United States in Vietnam. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Pg. 3.

Beliaev, I. and Anatolii Gromyko. (1989) “This is how we ended up in Afghanistan,” Literaturnaia Gazeta, 20 September 1989, translated in JPRS-UMA-890023, 4 October 1989 and found online at http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA354622.